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SANMELODY SOFTWARE FROM DATACOREFrom STORAGE Magazine Vol 8, Issue 06 - October 2008 Uptake of IP SANs has been enjoying exponential growth this year as businesses see the many benefits that iSCSI has to offer for network storage. The majority of solutions are appliance based, which does incur a price premium, but DataCore aims to offer a more cost-effective alternative. Its SANmelody software allows you to pick your own hardware platform and turn a standard Windows 2000 or 2003 system into a storage array supporting multiple iSCSI connections. Valuable features include support for unlimited host connections and options to use virtually any storage medium for iSCSI target presentation. If the host system can see the drive, then SANmelody can use it. The drives need to be prepared first and must be basic disks that have not been formatted or allocated a drive letter. Management is via a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, allowing SANmelody to be accessed directly from the Computer Management interface, so that you can view and configure the software, drivers and storage devices, all from one interface. Each host system is called an application server and just needs the freely available iSCSI initiator for the host OS installed. After logging them on to the storage system, they are added to SANmelody, after which they are assigned storage channels. The raw storage volumes on the host system are declared as virtual volumes and are then mapped to selected hosts. This allows you to implement strict access controls, as only those hosts that have volumes mapped to them will be able to use the storage. SANmelody offers some interesting options for host storage as, along with linear drives, it also supports storage pools comprising multiple physical drives. Thin provisioning allows you to present virtual volumes to application servers that are much larger than available physical space. Monitoring the used disk space and dynamically allocating disk blocks as required, with virtual volumes of up to 2TB, is supported. Storage pools can be increased in size easily, as more drives can be added where needed and, importantly, without incurring any downtime. For testing, we deployed SANmelody on a Boston Supermicro 3GHz dual-core Xeon system, running Windows Server 2003 R2, and had no problems creating multiple iSCSI targets and assigning them to other Server 2003 R2 host systems. Performance is impressive, as the Iometer utility reported raw read rates of 100MB/sec for one host over Gigabit Ethernet. This is very close to the speeds we've seen from many more costly IP SAN appliances, suggesting there are negligible performance overheads with SANmelody. SANmelody offers a lot more, as, along with iSCSI, it also offers optional support for fibre-channel (FC) Host Bus Adaptors, allowing both IP and FC SANs to be created. In our test host system, we had an LSI 4Gbps dual-port controller and SANmelody loaded drivers, allowing us to present virtual volumes over FC, as well as Gigabit Ethernet. There's much more, as MPIO (multi-path I/O) is on the menu and this uses multiple paths from hosts to virtual volumes to create redundant physical links. Snapshots are another smart feature, as you can take point-in-time images of one volume, use another virtual volume as a destination and present them both as iSCSI targets. Remote site replication is also an option, as AIM (Asynchronous IP Mirroring) allows a virtual volume at one site to be mirrored over a WAN link to another server, providing valuable disaster recovery options. During testing, we were impressed with SANmelody, as it is easy to deploy and manage, and offered very good performance. The wealth of optional features allows it to scale easily with demand and it offers big cost savings by allowing you to choose your own hardware platform for network storage.
VERDICT: We were impressed with SANmelody, as it is easy to deploy and manage, and offered very good performance. |
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